“Paci cation” Ë 55
evidence, only suspicion; that your soldiers are encouraged to loot and to pillage the shops; that
not only the women and the girls, but also little children, fare very badly at their hands.”
The general received these words quietly, but answered with some heat: “The people of this
province are bad, all bad, very bad. There is no other way to repress them than as my soldiers
are now doing.”
“There are many people here,” I added, “many dierent tribes and races – are none good?”
“No! they are all bad! The Georgians are the worst, but they are all against the government, and
must be put down.”
“By putting down, do you mean arresting them and burning their homes, or are these stories
false?”
The general showed slight irritation at this, and replied: “There are more than one hundred thou-
sand houses in this province, one hundred and twenty have been ordered burned since I came to
Kutais. What are one hundred and twenty out of so many?” Then, ashing his eyes directly upon
me, he added, in excellent French: “These people are terrorists, they are socialists, and revolu-
tionists. When I hear that a man is a socialist or revolutionist, I order my soldiers to burn down
his house. It is the only way.”⁷When Durland replied that his casual observation suggested that far more than 120
houses had been burned, the general replied that “my soldiers are ordered to burn
down a certain house, but of course they do not always have time to see that other
houses do not catch re and so burn also.” As for hundreds of women and young girls
who were raped by his soldiers, the general denied the charges, adding that “his sol-
diers were frequently forced to shoot women, but that was because women were often
revolutionists.”⁸A year and a half after this interview, on 16 July 1906, the general was
assassinated. Deeply aected by the violence in the Caucasus, Durland wrote that if
“I lived in the Caucasus, suering and bleeding under Russian misrule, I would be
a revolutionist.” He came to understand “why assassination is deemed a legitimate
weapon of warfare by the people of the Caucasus.” In fact, “I think I might reply to
these barbarous weapons – sanctioned and approved by the Czar’s government – with
the most eective weapons I could command – possibly even the revolver, the knife,
and the bomb.”⁹Such was the terrible state of aairs in Georgia.
Everywhere in the Caucasus repression was rampant. Even though Count Illarion
Vorontsov-Dashkov, viceroy of the Caucasus appointed in 1905 by Tsar Nicholas II with
the task of restoring order to the Caucasus, was a relatively liberal administrator, the
whole Caucasus soon “turned into one big prison.” By the rst half of 1909 thirteen
thousand people had been exiled from the Caucasus, and another eight thousand peo-
ple had been tried for political crimes. Even so, Petr Stolypin, Russia’s prime minster,
complained about the viceroy’s leniency toward “criminal organizations” of revolu-
7 Kellogg Durland,The Red Reign: The True History of an Adventurous Year in Russia(New York: The
Century Co., 1908), 111–12.
8 Durland,The Red Reign, 112–13.
9 Durland,The Red Reign, 120.